DIY Raspberry Pi Thermal Camera

Liz from Blitz City DIY has published a new Raspberry Pi thermal camera she has created on the Hackster.io website, powered by the Raspberry Pi an AMG8833 thermal camera sensor.

The AMG8833 thermal camera module is available from the Adafruit website priced at $40 and will measure temperatures ranging from 0°C to 80°C (32°F to 176°F) with an accuracy of +- 2.5°C (4.5°F). It can detect a human from a distance of up to 7 meters (23) feet, with a maximum frame rate of 10Hz.

Liz explains more about the awesome project :

When I heard about the AMG8833 thermal camera module, I knew that I really wanted to make a project with it. It’s able to send a thermal image to a screen, similar to a FLIR camera. I like to compare hardware with benchmarks so a project like this would be a great addition to my testing arsenal.

The AMG8833 is an Adafruit product and they have a great learning guide on it, showing you how to use it with both Arduino and Raspberry Pi. I chose to use a Raspberry Pi because in the example code provided by Adafruit, it uses bicubic interpolation to basically make the image appear to have a higher definition and not look as pixelated. I wanted to setup the AMG8833 with the Pi as a camera that had a screen on the back and was handheld, portable and not tethered to a wall for power.

For full instructions on how to create your very own thermal camera jump over to the official Hackster.io website.